By Steve Fey

As a student of humor and comedy, and a writer of scripts too boot, I naturally was interested to read about Penn Jilette’s new movie that premiered at Sundance in Utah recently. There’s this joke that comics rarely tell in public, but it’s very popular among comedians. It involves an opening, an ending, and an improvised middle. In music, J.S. Bach wrote an improvised middle to one of his concertos, so the idea isn’t new. Fact is, the joke may be as old as Shakespeare, although he’d have lost his head for telling it. The title is "The Aristocrats," which is also the punch line.

The middle of the joke is the most creative telling possible of the various ways family members can be, er, sexually indiscreet with each other. Follow that with the punch line above and you’ll see why Shakespeare had to never tell it in public. But, anyway, the thing is that the audience had a very mixed reaction to the movie.

The movie is a series of famous comedians telling the joke, one after another, with an incredible number of variations in the middle part. Part of the audience got up and walked out, clearly offended by the content. Part of the audience held their sides, slid down in their seats, and begged to be allowed to breathe between comedians (you aren’t, by the way.) As Penn says, the joke isn’t violent, it doesn’t demean any group (in America, at least, where we have no aristocrats), and involves a lot of hugging. What can be bad about that?

I’m writing about it because it illustrates an important point. That is that taking yourself too seriously, taking sex too seriously, taking anything too seriously, is a serious mistake. There’s only one way out of this world, and we all know what it is, so what’s to get so serious about in the meantime? The joke (I’ve heard the whole thing, but I don’t want to spoil anything) is funnier than all heck. I can’t wait to hear a string of really good comedians doing their worst to it. (The producers credit Gilbert Gottfried with the best version. See the movie and judge for yourself.) So, the moral of this tale is to for heaven’s sake, lighten up! Sex is why we’re all here, after all, and you get to be dead for a very long time. Take it easy, for your own sake. If you do anything else then you life, just like this article, just won’t be funny.

Okay, this is a humor site. Right. So I’ll say that I believe that one of the great things about the United States of America is that all people are entitled to respect and tolerance. This is true if you share my beliefs, or even if you are among the horribly misguided.

Peas.